Update

 So it has been brought to my attention that I haven’t updated in a while. Apparently, that’s true. My last update was literally the day that my entire life became a giant cluster fuck of living in the lab pretty much all the time. Since April 29th I’ve had… Maybe 4 days off? Up to 7, I guess. And by days off I mean days not coming into the lab, even though I was still doing work related things at home/on the road/when I was supposed to be relaxing. Yes, this obviously includes weekends. Does my boss really care? No, not really. However, she hasn’t been metaphorically breathing down my neck the last week or so, so that’s been nice. So since my life basically is work, that’s what I’m writing about. Deal with it.

Sooo… My rats are my life right now, basically. After testing them all summer on sucrose, we finally moved them onto surgery and cocaine. So that’s what they’re doing as I type this. Taking cocaine. My days range from 10-13 hours of sitting around waiting for them to finish taking their drugs. It’s almost like prison, really. Unlike when they were earning sucrose rewards, where I could freely wander and even leave the building, I now have to sit with them while they take their drugs. You know, so they don’t get tangled up on their lines or take too many drugs and fuck up my data. Luckily, most days I have people that can rat-sit for me so I can go eat lunch. Or just not be in this room for the entire day. Thankfully, there’s only a few more days of this part of the experiment and then I can go back to 5-6 hour days of this.

Over the summer I finally got the 2 papers I wrote last summer published. So 3 first author publications, yaaay. I’m finishing up my last cell culture based project and that should be written and sent out soon-osh. My boss has been pressuring me to finish my review paper (aka my "writtens"; aka basically re-write my writtens because no one wants to publish a 100 page document). By pressuring, I mean she won’t let me officially propose my dissertation until it’s been sent out for publication. Barf. However, these druggie rats are a large chunk of my dissertation. I will be graduating some time next year FUCK YES.

I can suture fairly well now. So come to me with all your lacerations.

I started teaching this semester. I don’t hate it and I don’t love it. I think I’m just on the "I don’t like this" train. It’s not fun, my class is eerily silent all the time, and it’s way too much work. Preparing 3 hours worth of shit to talk about every week is exhausting and the book I chose already gave me lecture slides. Too bad those lecture slides are usually confusing and only cover a fraction of what the book actually talks about so I still have a lot of work to do on them. I’m procrastinating working on lecture right now.

I had a student who circled answers on a scantron sheet on their first test. Read that again. And that is how teaching makes me feel.

I’m going to D.C. later this week for a conference. It’s my first time ever presenting behavioral data and I’m a little nervous. Granted, I’ve learned it’s a little easier to make a coherent story out of behavioral data rather than cellular data, but I just don’t want to look dumb. The only sort of good thing is that most people at this conference don’t know a damn thing about behavior anyway, so it shouldn’t be too bad. My poster is almost done, although I just got an email from my boss to make some minor corrections. 

In other news: We moved. Again. Our downstairs neighbor at our old apartment was a douche lord who complained to the landlord about the dogs. While I understand that the noise was probably really annoying, he would not be referred to as douche lord if he had simply talked to us about it so we could work something out BEFORE he went to the landlord. But no. So he complained, and first the landlord told us we had to get rid of Lucy. We said no and tried to work things out — and then she just mysteriously stopped trying to make us get rid of the dog or move or do anything. So we renewed our lease, and then douche lord complained again (and threatened legal action or something?) and our landlord told us she ripped up the new lease and we had to move within a month. So that was really fun. However, we both really like our new apartment so I suppose that it all worked out in the end.

I have other things to bitch about, like our new first year student who makes me want to punch him in the face, and the dirtiness of another lab mate. But I’ll save those stories for later since I should probably get back to work. That is granted, of course, that OD will let me write another entry. Tried to update all weekend with no luck.